


Fly on the Wings of Love

by Omnicat



Series: Pay It Forward [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bad Matchmaking, Bucky Bear - Freeform, Domesticity, Everybody Loves Bucky, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Gift Giving, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Secret Relationships, sharing food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:47:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1528526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/pseuds/Omnicat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>The Wings:</b> Bucky just wants to show his appreciation for everything Sam has done for Steve. Of course, Tony Stark’s middle name is ‘needlessly difficult’.</p><p><b>The Love:</b> Bucky tries to set Natasha up with Sam. He’s a bit late for that party, but he managed to find Steve’s shield and replace Sam’s wings: he’ll come up with something for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Wings

Sam and Bucky sat, shirtless, on the balcony of Steve and Bucky’s hotel room in Hammamet, a novel and a word sleuth book in their respective laps and their feet up on the chairs they’d levered over from Sam and Natasha’s balcony, since Steve and Natasha were out shopping and didn’t need them. Getting toasty was Bucky’s favourite thing in the world after Steve these days (hence going down to Hammamet instead of straight back to the States when France got too crowded), but the heat of his metal arm left out in the sun was a nuisance, and nobody appreciated the way it always managed to reflect the light straight into their eyes. Bucky’s left arm and shoulder were therefore wrapped in a flower-print shawl of Natasha’s, held in place with nappy pins and camel-shaped magnets. There wasn’t a molecule of intimidation left in the thing, until the person it was attached to suddenly jabbed it in Sam’s face without warning.

In the days after Bucky and Natasha joined Sam and Steve on their not-a-vacation turned okay-kinda-a-vacation, Bucky had quickly developed a habit of announcing resurfacing memories out loud, technically addressing Steve but effectively for everyone to hear. He’d jump up and point at Steve like what he’d just remembered was "you still owe me twenty bucks, which was a fucking fortune in the forties" instead of, say, "I lost my virginity to Sadie Woodhouse", or "I fell asleep sitting up in the summer heat – were you sketching me?". Sam would have been flattered Bucky trusted him enough to casually share such intimate revelations in his presence, but he and Natasha had already started snickering into their cocktails about being invisible stowaways on the super soldier reunion broneymoon, and in all honesty, Sam suspected that when Bucky got like that he stopped really registering anyone but Steve as a fellow sentient entity. (And sometimes ‘fellow’ was debatable. Fucking brainwashing, man.)

Which is why it caught Sam off guard when Bucky was suddenly in his face, aiming a killer robot finger at him, exclaiming " _You!_ "

"What?" Sam yelped, drawing his book to his chest like a shield. Which was a perfectly normal reaction, thankyouverymuch. Bucky was a nice guy and all, but unlike some people, Sam had a fully functional survival instinct.

"You were the man with the wings!" Bucky said, face an animated mixture of awe and bewilderment. "I didn’t realise until now."

Sam’s thoughts were a toss-up between _oh, it’s_ that _time again_ and "Tunnel visioned my face right out, did you?"

‘Tunnel vision’ had become Bucky’s shorthand for going through life brainwashed, because he found ‘brainwashed’ too science-fiction-y, like he’d only read about the Winter Soldier’s actions in a book instead of experiencing his decisions and observations as Bucky’s own – instead of _making_ them. Now that time and superhuman healing had finally had the chance to reduce the constantly reapplied brain damage to the scabbed-over-and-itching-like-crazy stage, Bucky could explain his previous state of mind casually enough. He got a little twitchy when it came to concrete examples of how unreliable that tunnel vision had made his perception of the world, though, and the less said about the means it had taken to create and maintain it, the better.

For a man working in veterans’ counselling, turning the tunnel vision thing into a quip just like that was perhaps _not_ the best reflex to fall back on. "Uh, I mean –"

But this time Bucky just nodded and kept on visibly turning things over in his head. "I thought I’d killed that man."

Sam settled for pointing out, "Well, you didn’t. I’m alive. Hurray!" and raising his fists in the universal sign of victory.

But Bucky’s face fell into the most dismayed expression Sam had ever seen outside of an emoticon. "But your wings."

Sam blinked. "Yeah... they went down with the helicarriers. But I’m alive!"

" _But your wings._ " Bucky’s previous expression was no longer the most dismayed expression Sam had ever seen outside of an emoticon; his current one was. "I’m so sorry."

Sam probably shouldn’t have found it so comical, but he did. He chalked it up to a belated victory high. The little sliver of vindication didn’t help either. Not like Sam had been holding the lack of acknowledgement of their short, sorry scuffle against him when Bucky couldn’t even remember Natasha’s face after being dispatched specifically to kill her, or whether his lifelong best friend had broken his arm in three places while he’d tried to kill _him_ , but detoxing from the adrenaline of flying got harder every time he had to do it. Still. God only knew how, but even Steve’s ‘kicked puppy dog’ face paled in comparison to Bucky’s.

"I was sorry to see them go too and I’m glad you care," Sam said. "But I’m the forgiving type and we both know you weren’t in your right mind, so as far as I’m concerned there wasn’t much to forgive in the first place. Just don’t make me plummet to my death again and we’re cool."

Bucky’s expression barely relaxed until Sam bopped him on the nose so he’d finally take his robo-hand out of his face. "Seriously man, don’t worry about it."

One corner of Bucky’s mouth curled up minutely as he fell back into his chair. "Sam, don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I really wish you guys would hold something against me and make me work for it for a change. It’s either I get worked up over little things like this, or I try to sell my soul to a witch in exchange for a time machine so I can unshape the whole damn century and bathe in Zola’s blood."

Christ. Sam would never stop being astonished at how _lucid_ Bucky could be about his situation. "Gimme a minute, I’ll unforgive you just as soon as I stop being dazzled by your wisdom."

It was impressive all around, really. Sure, he needed an hour alone with Steve to boot up the right personality some mornings, and they set his bedtime most evenings to when his mental batteries ran out and the robotic emergency back-up generator kicked in. But he had yet to revert back to psycho killer mode even once, and whatever had caused him to say "Good thing you guys didn’t see me two months ago, better for my dignity." that one time was still only an educated guess to Sam. He chalked that up as a small miracle.

Bucky’s crooked smile grew a little bigger even as he rolled his eyes. "Compartmentalisation is what it’s called, right? Don’t tell Steve, I don’t think he likes the word."

"That’s just ’cause he’s sore about one of the non-psychological definitions. It has its merits. Used right, it can help people immensely."

Bucky sighed and stared up at the sky. "Guess fishing your stuff out of the Potomac won’t do the trick this time, huh?"

"’Fraid not."

"And everyone I knew who could’ve fixed you up with a new pair is either dead or evil or both."

"If it’s any consolation, they were government property. I got away with being seen using stolen equipment this _one_ time because Cap and Natasha did the stealing and we saved the world and uncovered the biggest conspiracy in history and all that, but it would’ve been my swan song either way."

Bucky made a scandalized face. "What? What a load of crock."

"It is what it is," Sam said, shrugging a little easier for the vindication.

"I mean..." Bucky got a dreamy look in his eyes and sagged a little more bonelessly into his chair. "It must be amazing, to fly like that."

Sam couldn’t _not_ smile like a big softy sap. "It is, when nobody’s shooting at ya. Sometimes even then. If I could, I’d never touch the ground again."

"No kidding. You make Iron Man look like a game of human kick the can."

Sam cackled.

"I’m serious, you have the best superhero costume I’ve ever seen," Bucky went on.

"I’ve never been called a superhero before." Sam may have preened a little. "That arm of yours isn’t too shabby either."

Bucky didn’t even protest being lobbed in with the superheroes. "The coolest combat gear I’ve ever seen, period. And believe you me, I’ve seen some."

"Oh, is it compliment back pay day? Do keep going. You wanna work for it? Then work for it, boy."

Bucky’s grin was impish and his voice saccharine. "I bet it takes a heap of skill and practice, but you make it look so effortless..."

Sam could see why Steve liked the guy so much. His sides ached for hours.

 

_One month later:_

The intruder just _materialized_ in his lab, thin air one moment and there the next, didn’t have the decency to trip an alarm or kaboom his way in or anything. How was he even supposed to respond to that, other than by having a heart attack?

"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST."

"Tony Stark?" said the man, looking cautious behind the wall of holographic information projected over Tony’s desk. Tony stared indignantly back at him. On the shabby side, but showing no outward signs of deranged lunacy. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been armed, or smelly. This guy seemed reasonably well-groomed and rabies-free. Jeans, hoody, gloves, and a face like a boxer dog. Or one of those Snubbull pokémons, because in a world of aliens and super soldiers there was no reason pokémons weren’t already a real breed of dog. Or cat-fox, or floating ice-cream cone, or whatever. Even Tony could grow the responsibility to take care of a pet if only someone would genetically engineer the right pokémon already, but he digressed, there were more important things than the intruder’s ridiculous mouth-cheek configuration.

"Who the hell are you?" Tony said, because really? _Really?_ Aside from the trespassing, he was interrupting. Tony was – rather obviously, he should think – _reading_. "How the hell did you get in?"

"I come in peace," the intruder said, and actually _held up his hands_. "We have an appointment."

 _Dressed like **that?**_ Tony thought. He banished the projected files by banging a hand on the desk and hit the Keep Calm My House Is Filled With Hyper-Advanced Body Armour button while he was at it. "I don’t remember taking any appointments. Jarvis, who is this guy?"

"If you check your schedule, you’ll find it’s in there," the stranger claimed.

"Ah, that’s your problem right there. I never check my schedule, so as far as I’m concerned this appointment doesn’t exist."

"I’ve noticed." Tall Dark And Trespassing smiled a tiny, wry little bit. "That’s why I decided to come to you instead of waiting any longer for you to come to me."

Tony blinked, waited for the guns to come out and/or the superpowers to manifest or the reinforcements with guns and/or superpowers to burst in through the walls, _anything_ , blinked again, waited some more, thought: _huh_ , and crossed his arms over his chest. "So subtlety isn’t your strong suit, okay, I’ll make it less subtle: _go away_. I’m busy nursing a wounded ego."

The SHIELD data dump had taken Iron Man from an exclusive club of six – and that was _including_ Blonsky the fridged lunatic _and_ Rhodey, who owed his membership card to Tony – and put him on an index of _dozens_. None of them anywhere near as impressive as Iron Man or the Hulk or Thor, or even boring old Cap – pyrokinesis guy sounded fun, but he was dead which meant he didn’t count anymore, leaving mostly weirdoes who gave themselves lion’s paws or other incomprehensible, amateur nonsense like that – but the _principle_ of the thing.

This must be what it felt like to be boring and _normal_. No wonder he’d missed so much when he raided SHIELD’s servers during the Chitauri invasion. He’d gone over it all again and again since the implosion six months ago and he _still_ wanted to kick himself for not bothering sooner.

John Doe-eyes was only taken aback for a moment before he squared his shoulders and _finally_ got to the point, taking a flash drive from his pocket. "Mr Stark, I wish to commission a piece of technology from you. I have the specs right here –"

"Is the fate of the world at stake?"

The man of mystery frowned. "No."

"Are you gonna use it to do something illegal?"

"Not... that I’m... aware of?"

Well, that was just too bad, wasn’t it? Whatever it was the guy wanted, it couldn’t possibly justify the lack of blowing shit up or attempts at blowing Tony up it would take to build it.

"Not interested. And didn’t I just tell you to go away? Why do you think I would make something for you when I just told you to go away. Jarvis, who _the hell_ is this?" Tony asked, raising his voice just in case the microphones had suddenly become hard of hearing.

A beat.

Of silence.

"Jarvis?"

"I disabled the sound system," No-Name said in an odd, almost apologetic tone of voice. "I’m very sorry, I promise everything else is intact."

Tony’s mouth fell open. What?

"I will pay you, of course, the full and fair sum for your services. This is very important to me, Mr Stark. It’s for a friend of mine."

"Is this your first... kidnapping? robbery? extortion? You know, the last guys who tried to force me to build something for them didn’t fare so well, and they had years of practice," Tony felt compelled to point out.

The guy gave him a vacant kind of look, like he had no idea what Tony was talking about. Which, yeah right, Tony’s ego was only exactly as big as was warranted. "That’s... good? I’m not here to force you into anything. I come in peace."

No, seriously, _what?_

...the dude looked so _hopeful_.

"Don’t take this the wrong way, I know a lot of perfectly nice hobos, but you don’t look like you can afford me," Tony said in his best approximation of ‘gentle’.

But the guy’s eyes lit up. Right. No good with the subtlety.

"I know your fee," he said, picked up a sports bag Tony hadn’t noticed him setting down against the desk any more than he’d noticed him come in, stepped forward – Tony stubbornly failed to wheel his chair back an equal distance – put the bag on the desk, unzipped it, and held it open to show Tony the contents.

It was filled to the brim with cash.

Tony pinched the bridge of his nose. "To rephrase; you don’t look like someone who can afford to pay me using _legally acquired money_."

His friendly neighbourhood burglar’s expression darkened, and for the first time, Tony felt like he might _actually_ be dangerous and this encounter was _finally_ starting to make sense. Then –

"This used to be Hydra’s. I’m morally opposed to calling it stealing when the previous owner should never have had it in the first place."

– and wow, a self-righteous wannabe supervillain, talk about anticlimactic.

"I don’t actually disagree, but see, this is what I mean. Blood money. Not a good thing to be offered. Not an indicator of your trustworthiness."

Burglar Babyface bit his lip, and if that wasn’t the most unprofessional nervous tick ever for a criminal type, Tony didn’t know what was.

"You can also have this," he said after a moment, and proceeded to strip off his gloves and his hoody and his shirt, and before Tony could so much as formulate a quip about it being five months late for a birthday stripper, his vision filled with smooth, sleek, gleaming movement, and _hello baby_ , are you a gauntlet or a prosthesis or –

Ah. Scar tissue all around the shoulder. Good thing he hadn’t asked.

The man attached to the silver beauty turned her this way and that, rotating the shoulder, bending the elbow, opening and closing the fist.

"Bulletproof, punches holes in concrete, sophisticated enough pressure sensors to weave daisy chains, better motor control than the real one," he listed. "Soviet design with several decades’ worth of Hydra upgrades."

Tony’s eyes snapped to his face.

"None of this was in the SHIELD data dump. I’ll let you examine it, reverse engineer it, keep the tech." His mouth pulled into either a grimace or a grin, Tony couldn’t really tell. "Hell, if there’s a way to take it off, you can keep the whole thing."

Tony’s insides had gone cold, but his brain was struggling to catch up. "If there’s a way? It’s your arm, shouldn’t you know if there’s a way?"

"That knowledge was need to know, and I never needed to know."

"Oh, Christ." Tony’s brain caught up, but that proved less helpful than he’d hoped. There was a myriad of explanations for what was going on here, and none of them were nice, but none of them were exactly compatible with each other either. Confirming which was the right one also required straight answers he didn’t seem likely to get, considering he still hadn’t been told a _name_ , so... "Fine, I’ll look at your arm, whatever."

Tony reached out, but Cyborg held it behind his back. "In exchange for the wings."

"Wings? What wi– oh, that thing you want me to build. Show me the damn specs," Tony snapped. The flesh and blood hand held out the flash drive, and Tony snatched it, plugged it in, and gave the contents a cursory glance. "Oh, these. Old news. Saw them, improved them, got bored with them years ago."

Years? Months? Decades? Who cared. Time was relative, and the standard units of measurement meant shit-all, anyway.

"I’ll have Jarvis whip you up a pair of my own design on the assembly line," Tony said, because why the hell not, it may or may not help but it definitely wouldn’t hurt. "Got that, Jarvis? I assume you just said ‘yes sir’ through your sad deadened speakers. Oh, and while you’re at it, run facial recognition and _show_ , don’t tell me, who the hell Fullmetal Alchemist here is."

The information lit up so suddenly it caused... Bucky Barnes? ... _the_ Bucky Barnes? ...to startle back a step.

"The _hell?_ " Tony said with conviction. "You better have a good explanation for this, Jarvis."

A window saying ‘explanation/more information available’ lit up, and offered up said info without prompting, key passages highlighted. The connections were tenuous – roughly coinciding dates, a file the Kremlin would nuke him for accessing that contained the phrase ‘an American soldier of some symbolic significance’, which probably sounded more professional in Russian, a SHIELD/Hydra patent for the alloy making up the arm, an urban legend that read like the Bermuda Triangle of the international spy scene... and a brief text exchange, not long after Insight Day, initiated in cryptic terms by Natasha Romanoff and quickly made painfully un-cryptic by Steve Rogers.

Tony shot the brainwashed superhuman assassin from the ’40s an accusatory look.

Boogeyman Barnes held up his hands again, like when this farce of a conversation first started. "I come in peace. The wings are for a friend. He’s a good man who looked after someone dear to me when I couldn’t. I will pay you in full and I will let you dissect my arm."

"I heard you the first time. Thing is, the definition of ‘peace’ seems to have gotten awful broad lately. Hulkbuster, catch."

Barnes was fast. Tony’s suits were faster. Within seconds, Jarvis had the suit across the room, and Barnes barely had time to turn towards it before it opened up, swallowed him whole, and locked.

"Facing this way Jarvis, come on, use the brain I gave you."

The suit turned obediently and then froze again. Only Barnes’ face was still visible within, wide-eyed and appropriately frantic-looking. Hulkbuster was strong enough to wrestle Bruce’s big bad alter ego, keeping a super-soldier restrained inside was only the logical flipside.

"I come in peace," Barnes said again. "I come in peace."

"Contrary to popular belief, I’m not _entirely_ comprised of suicidally idiotic impulses," was all Tony had to say to that, fishing a cell phone out of his pocket. He dialled and hit speaker.

A female voice answered on the second ring. "Hello?"

Tony frowned at the phone. "You’re not Steve."

"Oh, hey Tony. It’s Natasha. Steve’s taking a shower."

"Prove it."

There was a moment of silence, then a rustle of static, more silence, and then the sound of a shower running. "Hey Steve, say hi to Tony."

"Hi Tony," said Steve’s voice. "Natasha, get the hell out of my bathroom, that door was locked for a reason."

"Tony wanted to say hi," she said. "He still doesn’t trust me."

"You can trust her, Tony," Steve said.

Tony rolled his eyes. "Well, that proves you’re Steve alright."

"That all you needed him for, Mr Stark?" Natasha asked with an audible smirk.

"Maybe. Are you missing your Robocop by any chance? You seen that movie yet, Steve?"

It took a moment for Steve to answer that, during which Tony liked to think he looked adorably oblivious until Natasha, the eternal spoilsport, mouthed the answer for him.

"Bucky’s with you?" was the end verdict. The shower turned off.

"Should he be?"

"Sure, why not. He didn’t mention where he was going, but I’m not his jailor or anything. Say hi to him for me?"

Tony relaxed a bit. "You’re on speaker, you just did."

"Hey Buck," Steve said.

"Hey Steve," Barnes answered, a little breathless.

"What are you doing at Stark’s?"

"See, that’s what I wanted to ask _you_ ," Tony said. "’Cause, funny thing, the first I hear about his very _existence_ this side of the Second World War is when he waltzes into my workshop with no warning –"

"I made an appointment and everything, what more warning do you want from me?!"

"– and no indication of whether he’s still a brainwashed murder machine of Hydra’s, or gone on a roaring rampage of revenge against everyone associated with SHIELD, for which he certainly looks the part –"

"He’s not," Steve and Natasha said in unison.

"Neither of those." (Natasha.)

"And could you be more insensitive if you tried, Tony?" (Steve.)

“Hey, I’ve been down and low and fueled by rage, I speak from experience.”

"I’m not," Barnes groaned. "I come in peace." He was starting to look more than a little pinched. Tony spared a fleeting thought to wonder exactly how many inches the guy had on himself, the man whose measurements the suit was designed to.

"So I’m not about to be slaughtered like a pig?"

"If he wanted you dead, Stark, you’d be dead already," Natasha said, far too flippantly.

"He doesn’t want you dead, Stark," Steve said. "Right, Buck?"

"Right."

"You okay, pal? You sound a little funny."

"Just peachy," Barnes all but whimpered, eyes squeezed shut.

Tony was beginning to feel sorry for the guy. "Alright, one last thing I need you to confirm and then I’ll let the justified paranoia slide: he says he wants me to build a pair of mechanical wings for a friend of his."

"Aww, really?" Natasha cooed. "That’s adorable. Look, Steve, Bucky made his first new best friend too."

"IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A SURPRISE."

"Don’t worry, Sam’s not in here with us," she said. "We won’t tell."

So no being exploited for nefarious purposes either. Excellent.

"There should not have been a ‘we’ in that sentence," Steve grumbled. "Gimme the phone and get out."

"No, no, don’t act all coy on my account. Enjoy your shower sex, I have to let Sergeant Barnes out of his cage now," Tony said.

"Cage?" Steve sounded alarmed. "Tony, what –"

"Bye!"

End call.

"Hulkbuster, release."

The suit opened up and Barnes stumbled out.

"Okiedokie, now that we _finally_ know you’re not some kind of slow weirdo ax-murderer, let’s have a look at that arm of yours," Tony said, cracking his knuckles. Then he hesitated. "Uh."

Barnes was on hands and knees, five seconds away from hyperventilating.

"Oh, crap."

 

Forty-five minutes later, the thermostat in the lab was cranked up high and Barnes was huddled in a blanket with his organic hand wrapped around a cup of hot cocoa and little marshmallows. There were also platters of cookies, cake and little sandwiches set up on the workbench in front of him, as well as tea and coffee and cocoa refill. Dummy had gotten halfway through the high tea spread Pepper had stocked for tomorrow’s bi-weekly tea party slash ‘the world is full of superhuman boyfriends and down a superwrangling agency, now what’ meeting with her new lady minions Hill and Foster, before he dropped the savoury snacks tray and the noise alerted Pepper. Who had taken Tony’s panicked appropriation of her stash of comfort food and the presence of a half-naked kicked puppy killbot in the tower after hours like a champ. She was currently awkwardly patting a blushing Barnes’ back and trying to explain the Bucky Bear nestled in the crook of his more interesting arm (her pristine back-up bear with the little plastic rifle still on its back and all the tiny buttons still attached, not the lovingly battered one she kept in her bedside table) in a way that didn’t sound too much like ‘you’ve been my dead celebrity crush since high school and the only reason I’m giving this embarrassing piece of merchandise to you instead of asking you to sign it is because my boyfriend just traumatized the hell out of you’.

It was what Tony imagined pyjama parties must be like when they didn’t involve booze and strippers instead.

"See, the nice thing about modern technology –" Tony started, loudly enough to catch both Pepper and Barnes’ attention and quell that little surge of absolutely-not-jealousy. "– is that there’s no need for any invasive procedures just to get a good look at stuff."

He blew up the hologram of Barnes’ arm with a wave of his hands, and it opened up like a masterful and deadly mechanical flower. He _wanted_ to touch it. Wanted _so bad_ to get his hands all over and inside of that (awful, invasive) work of engineering art. But this was not the time to let his inner mad scientist out to play.

Tony sighed and hoped it didn’t sound too much like longing. "I would say this is a beautiful piece of work, but I’m morally opposed to complimenting my villainous colleagues."

"Is it bugged?" Barnes asked, voice still on the raspy side. "Rigged?"

Pepper looked horrified. "You’ve been walking around with a possibly rigged arm for how long?"

He shrugged his non-metal shoulder. "It took a while before the possibility started worrying me, and by then nothing had happened for so long I figured it could wait until I found someone trustworthy to take a look."

Jeeze. "I don’t know why the radio silence, but you got lucky, pal. Yes to bugs, yes to being rigged," Tony said. "There’s a ‘stop working and use all power to electrocute the host brain’ circuit, but it has to be activated remotely. Just not _too_ remotely, it has a range of maybe thirty yards. A limitation offset by three different trackers, one in the arm, one in the shoulder base, and one in your _other_ shoulder. No worries now, though, I’ll have all that fixed for you before you can say ‘fifteenth president of the United States’."

"Thank you," Barnes said quietly.

"No problem. I mean that literally, I could do this in my sleep, it’s barely a challenge. I won’t even charge you. Throw in a free set of wings for a friend of a friend, national hero, victim of entirely reasonable safety measures and all that."

One corner of Barnes’ mouth curled up.

"Tony," Pepper said patiently. "His other shoulder is _not_ made of metal. You are _not_ qualified to perform surgery on a human being."

"I can get that one myself," Barnes said, immediately followed by an announcement from Jarvis.

"Sir, Captain Rogers has arrived, accompanied by Agent Romanoff and a Mr Sam Wilson."

Tony was glad he’d restored Jarvis’s voice because it provided a distraction for Pepper, but then that distraction marched into the workshop and caught sight of the thing Pepper needed distracting from and the state it was in, and all of Tony’s gladness left the building.

"Stark, what did you _do?_ "

"He stuck me in an iron maiden-like hollow robot and said he’d cut me open with no medical training," Barnes reported blithely.

There was a moment of silence.

Then Cap’s eyes went from comically wide and trained on Barnes to dagger-shooting slits boring into Tony.

"You lied to me," Tony realised. "All of you. Well, not you, new guy –"

Wilson raised a hand in greeting. "Hi."

"– but only on a technicality. You guys assured me he wouldn’t try to murder me. This is murder by Steve Rogers. See, there he comes. Oh god, he’s coming for me, Pepper, help me! They can’t do this to me, I have audio evidence, this is a breach of contract. Pepper, call my lawyers, call my bodyguards –"

"Happy’s my bodyguard nowadays, honey. You’re fresh out."

Barnes pretended not to laugh evilly and only succeeded in choking on his hot cocoa.

 

Tony got off with half a lecture he would’ve gotten from Pepper anyway, quickly and without a shred of remorse deflected Steve’s ire to Bucky by pointing out what he’d said about cutting _himself_ open, which earned _him_ a lecture from Steve _and_ Pepper, and everybody forgot all about it once Jarvis announced the wing pack was done and ready for use.

Watching Wilson jump off the top of the tower whooping for joy was _much_ more entertaining.

(Tony may, conceivably, have started drawing up plans for two extra Avengers floors then and there.)


	2. The Love

"Sam seems awful sweet on you," Bucky told Natasha out of the blue one day.

Their little road trip was, for all intents and purposes, over. Brooklyn had become a ghost: the streets were changed, Steve and Bucky’s friends and neighbours had died off, and the descendants of Bucky’s sisters had scattered to the four winds, not one remaining on their mothers’ home soil. Steve had torn himself away from the empty husk of his once-home long ago, and when Bucky felt there weren’t any more memories to be wrung from the half-familiar, half- _wrong_ streets, he made no secret of how badly he wanted to run too.

Stark hadn’t stopped them; he never did like making friends the easy way. Consolidating all the Avengers candidates – old _and_ new – in that building of his was going to take ages, if it happened at all. So, with the sight-seeing and reminiscing and ill-advised business meetings over with and Stark’s lawyers done hashing out the legality of Sam’s new wings (Natasha pitied Bucky a little; he’d tried so hard to do it right, but there was no way the examples he’d had to draw from weren’t all rotten to the core), the four of them drifted back to Washington.

Sam re-established his civilian life like this had just been tour number three and made sure they all understood that he could not and would not be their friend and their therapist at the same time. Actually, he wasn’t a doctor qualified to be anyone’s Proper Shrink at all. But he reserved the right to leave them self-help materials and referentials to more qualified professionals when and as he saw fit in his capacity as the self-appointed Responsible Adult-slash-Only Sane Man. Steve, meanwhile, found a new apartment without holes and ears in the walls and, one morning, helped re-introduce Bucky to Peggy Carter. Bucky started thinking of something to do with his life that didn’t involve poking holes in people, claiming ‘housewife duty’ for himself in the meantime, and Natasha... lingered. Came and went through the others’ personal spheres like a benevolent enigma; crashed at either Sam’s or Steve’s place at night as their collective mood struck them. Bucky needed the bone-deep familiarity of Steve’s face to be the first thing he saw whenever he woke up, meaning there were two beds crammed into Steve’s bedroom and the spare was free for the taking. So as long as she cleaned up after herself and pitched in for her share of the groceries, Natasha didn’t physically inconvenience any of the boys.

They were humoring her, she knew. Until she either moved on by herself or started looking like she needed help to, they would roll with her eccentricities like they rolled with the loose screws in all of their heads, the way you rolled with any of the harmless little pathologies of those you’d been through hell with. She’d agreed with Maria to keep tabs on the DC trio just like Maria was doing in New York with Stark, Banner (who had an apartment with his name on it in the Tower that he’d only occasionally occupied until his SHIELD-issued cover fell through) and Thor (who had an open invitation but, between his duties off-world and Dr Foster’s scientific pursuits, used it only sporadically), but this? Was _not_ that.

Truth be told? Much as she usually enjoyed being anyone but herself, this version of Natasha Romanoff had a good thing going.

She had no _better_ place to be, at any rate. With the world busily convulsing as it turned itself inside out and Hydra remnants scurrying every which way, odds were this life, its little bubble of domesticity and normalcy, would pop sooner or later. But Natasha’s new cover could wait until it did.

In between helping Steve and Bucky move Steve’s belongings into their new apartment and helping Bucky shop for things of his own, she’d shaved the sides of her head down to a semi-transparent red fuzz and learned she totally rocked the lazy hawk.

"There’s an awful lot of fellas sweet on me at any given time. It’s a skill," Natasha said now, lounging on the couch with Bucky cross-legged on the floor in front of her, folding laundry on the coffee table.

"And not just white fellas, huh?" Bucky remarked, and Natasha looked up from her phone (Sharon was having a less than challenging day at work and kept distracting Natasha from her own work with cat videos) to raise an eyebrow at him. "What?"

"Not just those, no. Like I said, it’s a skill. It transcends the silly social constructs we’ve imposed on this imperfect world."

"Can’t say I’m surprised." The smile he gave her was terribly fond, but as soon as she answered it with a smirk it upended itself and turned into an uncomfortable frown. He pulled a pair of Natasha’s running pants from the laundry basket and folded them. "It’s just – I don’t have a problem with it, and I know Steve doesn’t either. Sam seems to know that, so I guess they talked about it at some point."

Natasha raised an incredulous eyebrow.

"But he’s being awfully obvious about it. Which is what happens when you’re in love, I know, but he’s my friend and I _worry_ –"

"Oh my god," Natasha interrupted when realisation hit. "Nobody’s going to lynch him for hitting on a white girl, you ridiculous mama bear." The look on his face made her snort. "None of this worried you all those times Sam and I shared a hotel room."

He stared for a moment, not comprehending. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, dropped his face in his hands, and muttered _fuck, fuck, fucker_ under his breath. "You’re right. Shit, I can’t believe..."

("Did you have this problem too?" he’d asked, the last time this happened.

"They got me when I was five," she’d answered after a long moment. "By the time I got out age had taken its toll. There wasn’t anything there to come back and confuse me in the first place."

There had been layer upon layer of false memories instead, and she’d had those for years and years.)

She took pity on him and kept her voice gentle. "Did you remember something or did this come out of nowhere?"

"I don’t know if I remembered before or after I opened my mouth," he admitted. "But my father had this conversation with his own sister once. Almost word for word. I was... very small. My mother was pregnant and I helped her with the laundry. They thought I wasn’t listening, I guess. The guy Aunt Marianne fell for was called Clay. I always pictured him with the wrong skin color because of that name. Weird dissonance." He shook his head and raked a hand through his hair, sighing. "But not half as weird as this."

"Whites and non-whites have been able to marry for almost fifty years, you know."

He let that sink in. "Wow."

"The _president_ had one white and one black parent."

He conjured up a weak smirk and lobbed a pair of socks at her. "Alright, alright, I get it."

"It could’ve been worse. You could’ve not remembered it at all," she said, leaning forward to ruffle his hair. "So you cherish that memory and I’ll update the script: you confront me about Sam’s apparent feelings for me by way of an anecdote from the twenties and remark how nice it is how society has progressed, because it means that unlike your father, you’re not speaking up out of fear of the wrong random passers-by finding out, but because you’re a consummate busybody and your first instinct upon seeing one of your friends unwillingly single is to play matchmaker. Of course you try to deny your underlying motive, to play it off like maybe you’ve got your own eye on a black girl somewhere, how would I know? But I wasn’t born yesterday, so I tell you not to even think about it. You try to play innocent and promise not to pull anything, I call you on your blatant lies, you bat your big blue eyes at me some more. I remind you that we are partners in matchmaking, that we combine our powers to use against Steve, we do _not_ turn them on each other, and we part ways just waiting for the inevitable."

"You know me too well. It’s scary," Bucky said, beaming.

"Reading you is like reading a billboard. _That’s_ what’s scary, _sobrat_.[*](https://translate.google.nl/#ru/en/%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82) I’m embarrassed to admit we’re products of the same evil science division."

"Kids these days. Spoiled rotten by the progress of technology," he tsk-ed. "So you’re not interested in Sam then?"

Oh, she was doomed. So, so doomed. Natasha really did want to keep him. She wanted to have pointedly casual conversations like this and rag on his terrible pronunciation of Russian and dress him up and destroy his enemies, and she wanted to get fed and doted upon and sometimes absently petted, like she was his fucking cat, forever. It was like Clint all over again.

"Whether or not I’m interested is beside the point," Natasha said, far too indulgently and not caring. "No matchmaking."

He gave her a long, shrewd look.

 _Of course_ there was matchmaking.

 

Bucky sidled up to Sam at the kitchen counter as smoothly as if he rolled in on a tiny train track, and set a bag of groceries on the counter. "Heeeey, Sam."

"Heeeeey, Buck."

"Did you know," Bucky said, snatching the knife and cutting board from Sam’s hands with deadly domestic grace. "that blacks and whites have been able to get married in every American state for almost fifty years now?"

His mechanical arm was almost a blur as he took up chopping paprikas where he’d cut Sam off. Fucking super soldiers.

"I may have heard _something_ along those lines. The once. Through the grapevine. In encoded smoke signals," Sam said. He leaned a hip against the counter, arms crossed and eyebrows raised in amusement. "I mean, I didn’t sleep through the past fifty years like you did, but it’s such an esoteric bit of knowledge."

Grinning wolfishly, Bucky moved on to decimating the leek and waggled his eyebrows at Sam.

"You got designs on me, white boy?"

"Nah, not me."

"That’s being legalized in an increasing number of states too, you know."

"One thing at a time." Bucky reached out with the hand still holding the knife and gently turned Sam’s head until he was looking out into the living room where Natasha lounged in all her faux-hipster glory, engrossed in whatever she’d been up to on her phone all day. Bucky looked pointedly at Sam. Looked pointedly at Natasha. Looked pointedly back at Sam. Waggled his eyebrows again. "It’s _legal_ now."

"Oooooh," Sam said, finally catching on – and laughed. "I don’t think she’s the marrying type, man."

"But the option is open to you. Just saying." He gave Sam a hugely exaggerated saucy wink and then started making shooing motions. Still with the damn knife. "Now scram. How many times do I have to tell you, guests do not do chores or prepare their own meals in my household."

"You were making your emergency grocery run," Sam protested. "We’re _hungry_. I think Steve may have collapsed under the strain of his suped-up metabolism, I don’t even know _where_ he disappeared off to."

"He’s still talking to the phone company about that hidden number we want. I can feed you faster if you stop making excuses."

"Alright, alright, you’re the king of the kitchen."

"Damn straight."

Sam plopped down on the couch beside Natasha and started in a whisper, "Did you hear...?"

"He has no idea," she whispered back, shooting him a smirk. "Humor him. For me. I think he’s decided it’s my turn to get compensated for past altercations. He’ll find the ceramic knife set in my Amazon wish list soon enough and forget all about this matchmaking stuff."

"Sounds likely enough," Sam allowed. "But do you really think leading him on until then’s a good idea?"

"If he keeps it up and it bothers you, blow him off politely, just don’t _enlighten_ him. We have a right to our privacy, and no good will come from setting unrealistic examples for him about how many of your questions will actually get answered as a free man in the twenty-first century. Besides..." Natasha paused for a moment to applaud Bucky for slicing three potatoes in a row in mid-air. "He’s a big boy. He’d hurt more thinking we’ve been treating him like a fragile little flower than finding out we were harmlessly messing with him a little."

Sam looked dubious.

Natasha brushed her knuckles along his cheek while Bucky’s back was turned. "You’re a great soldier, and great with soldiers, Sam. I’m a great spy, and great with assassins and ex-brainwashees. Take my word on this one."

Well, Bucky’s curiosity was insatiable now that he was finally able to feel curious again without having to worry about getting his brain fried for asking questions, but Natasha was probably right. A lot of the vets Sam knew struggled with the constant hyper-alertness they’d grown accustomed to in warzones and balancing the need to feel safe with the inevitability of not being able to know and control everything, but Bucky seemed to have come out of seventy years of torture and murder thinking, ‘Have you looked at me lately? I am literally superman. If it hasn’t killed me yet it’s not gonna kill me now, so damn right I’m sleeping with the front door unlocked. If it was good enough for the forties it’s good enough for the twenty-tens, and by the way, I tear the doors off of cars with my bare hands. _Where are your locks now?_ ’ Natasha had been shrouded in mystery and misconception from the very start and it had never bothered Bucky much. Hell, by this point he’d practically adopted her, wildcarding and curveballing and all.

Sam shrugged. "Okay."

 

"He’s not being very subtle, is he?" Sam asked later that evening, snorting to himself. "Like, at all. And here history had me thinking he was such a sly devil."

Bucky had talked about the pros and cons of the 1940’s dating scene and grilled Sam and Natasha about the current one all throughout dinner and the movie. Every last one of the countless ‘hypothetical’ questions he’d asked had featured the ‘hypothetical’ scenario of Sam and Natasha hooking up. Steve had failed to make up his mind about whether to groan or grin.

"I give it a year," Natasha yawned. Sam was starting to suspect she was naturally a nap-after-sex type, when she let herself be natural. "He’s still growing back the necessary brain functions for smooth-talking."

Sam hummed and nuzzled into her neck. "You think they had fuck buddies in the forties?" he wondered idly. He had one arm wrapped around her waist and the warmth of her bare back pressed into his chest, and was starting to feel pleasantly drowsy himself.

Now Natasha snorted. "People don’t change their ways, only the face they put on about it for others. Bucky just doesn’t know how to read our modern clues. Steve might. He’s had more time to socialize in our time."

"Bucky was supposed to be the ladies man back in the day, though. Performing is one thing, but you’d think he’d sense _something_."

"Hmm, true." Natasha absently reached up to scratch Sam’s scalp. "And Steve hasn’t shown any sign of trying to stay politely out of our business either."

"We _have_ been very sneaky," Sam said, and nipped at her shoulder with a grin.

Natasha gave him one of those amused, close-lipped smiles over her shoulder. "Your spy game shows promise, Private Grasshopper."

Then she curled up and fell asleep in his arms, and Sam thought that maybe Natasha’s ‘opening up to your friends for no other reason than that you _can_ ’ game showed promise too.

 

Alright, so Natasha did a little more than just ‘linger’. She got to know Sam’s other friends on saturday nights (introducing her as Just A Friend for simplicity’s sake). She gave Bucky tips on things that had helped her own deprogramming throughout the years (and maybe the tight jeans and leather vest – restrictive, non-stretch fabrics to trick his body into thinking _body armor_ on days when his preferred Normal Person wardrobe left him feeling too alienated – served a dual purpose, but so what). In turn, Bucky taught her the lindy hop, the jitterbug, how to swing like a real forties girl, and she soaked it up like a particularly greedy sponge (skills were like false identities in that you could never have too many, and a helluva lot less likely to be considered unhealthy besides).

An outsider might have said she was putting down roots. Natasha herself was itching for an opportunity to unleash her fantastic quip about portable potted plants.

That being said, she had to fight down the urge to throw a smoke bomb (hell yes she was carrying) and make an unnecessarily dramatic escape when one of the grocery store employees greeted her with a cheerful ‘welcome back!’. The locals in Sam’s neighbourhood were starting to recognize her. God, she was in deep.

Sam got a shopping cart and took the grocery list from his back pocket. Natasha waited until they were out of the cashiers’ line of sight and hopped into the cart. Without missing a beat, Bucky sighed, rolled his eyes, and turned back to get a second cart.

She’d trained her boys so well.

"Oh, get me those," she said in the candy isle, pointing at the mini M&Ms.

Bucky dropped a bag into his cart.

"And one for at Sam’s place."

Bucky grabbed another bag and gave her an odd look. "You’re gonna get fat," he said, looking away and biting his lip.

Sam gasped dramatically.

Natasha’s spider-senses started tingling.

"Little plump girls get underestimated even more than little skinny girls," she said with a shrug.

"Oooh, _burn_ ," Sam crowed.

"Hey, I _like_ a woman with a little meat on her bones," Bucky protested far too cheerfully. "There was this girl in France – Veronique? Monique? Dominique? – I don’t remember her name, but God, I couldn’t keep my hands off of her. Soft and squishy all over and giggly as anything. I wanted to _eat_ that girl."

Natasha snorted. "Try not to get carried away now. We’re in public, and don’t think for a second people aren’t staring intently at your ass and what you’re packing."

Bucky ever so casually bent over to lean his elbows on the cart, grinning hugely. "Just saying. If I were making moves on you I’d buy you five of these. Wouldn’t you, Sam?"

Sam groaned and bent over too, dropping his head on Natasha’s shoulder. "Oh god, not _this_ again."

Natasha laughed.

"Yeah, that one _was_ kinda obvious, wasn’t it?" Bucky admitted unrepentantly.

"You’re always obvious," Natasha said. "You’re ‘firing bazookas at mosquitoes’ obvious."

"I sure hope you don’t treat strangers the way you treat us, man," Sam said, shaking his head fondly.

"Hey, I’m messed in the head but I’m not _that_ messed in the head. You’re just special."

"I am so very flattered," Sam deadpanned.

"Speaking of, cart me over to the beauty isle, will you," Natasha said, gesturing imperiously.

"Here’s your chance to practice acting natural, Buckster." Sam stuck his head close to Bucky’s and lowered his voice as they wheeled her over. "Girls these days like their men either metro or cucumber cool. Any sign of mockery, incredulity, or contempt and you’re out."

"I grew up with three sisters, you think I don’t know about feminine care routines?" Bucky mumbled, studying the displays of make-up and beauty creams with that look of bemused wonder that meant he was trying to connect dusty and battered memories to their modern counterparts. "...or knew."

While Natasha rifled through the selection of foundation, Bucky snatched something from another shelf, peered intensely at the label, and then held it up to Sam.

"Is this true?" he whispered. "Can over-the-counter product really do that now?"

"I don’t know?" Sam whispered back. "Maybe a little?"

"Gotta be _at least_ a little, right? Steve says there’s super-strict rules about not lying about what you’re selling these days. Flour’s gotta be flour and nothing but flour, not two parts flour to eight parts whatever junk you happen to be able to pass off as flour. That kinda thing."

"It probably doesn’t do shit, man. No amount of regulation will stop companies from finding ways to sell you hot air cut with lies."

"What size are we talking about, anyway?"

"Why, how big you got ’em? I thought you super soldiers didn’t –"

"No, not _me_."

Natasha didn’t pretend not to be listening. Bucky turned toward her and braced himself. "Natt – Natasha?"

"Yeah?"

"Here." He handed her the little jar. "It’s on me. Try it sometime. You know, where I –" He gestured helplessly. "– shot you. I know you hate how much the scar – _scars_ – stand out. I don’t know how well it works, but it never hurts to try, right?"

Frowning, she read the label.

Moisturizing, pore-cleansing, wrinkle-lifting, and scar-fading skin rejuvenation cream. Good grief.

"Unless you just hate how impractical it is when you’re trying to pass for a non-combatant, but you’re more of a battle trophy kinda gal otherwise," Bucky went on uncertainly. "I knew a couple of guys like that, loved their scars like others loved their sweethearts. In which case I guess I can get you some of whatever you use to cover them up on the job."

Natasha was glad Nick hadn’t left a number to contact him by, because for a moment she was _this_ close to calling him to ask if she’d ever been this bad. If she was _still_ this bad. If, when you switched out her non-existent childhood for the twenty-five formative years of mundane domesticity Bucky had to draw from, this was exactly what she was like too.

 

An inconspicuous number of days after that heart-warming yet cringe worthy incident, Natasha lured James ‘Curiosity Cannot Kill A Cat’ Barnes in by laughing evilly at Captain America-themed boxer briefs on Amazon, showing him how the site worked, and then, when her phone went off right on cue, dashing off to run a Very Sudden And Very Important Errand for Sharon. She bought donuts and a Starbucks coffee with white chocolate and five other deliciously decadent ingredients and snuck them into the movie theatre where they’d agreed to meet, because she was just that good and sometimes you had to treat yourself to the benefits of your hard-earned skills.

Sharon’s chick-flick of choice was ninety-five solid minutes of fluffy mindless relaxation, and as expected, when Natasha hacked Steve’s online bank records later that night, Bucky had indeed made a substantial Amazon purchase after she left.

Steve discovered all his underwear suddenly had his face on them not long after.

The knives Natasha had been expecting were nowhere to be seen, though. Bucky just kept up the attempts at matchmaking instead – in between replacing random household items with ridiculous merchandise and making Steve hunt down their original things like Easter eggs.

Sam backed out of the game before long, as expected, but did not, in fact, spill the beans, which was something of a surprise. He’d been deeply perturbed by the way Natasha explained the minor meltdown Bucky had had following a violent robbery the two of them foiled during a late-night emergency snack run –

("I just wish he’d talk to a professional. It’s like nothing I’ve said has gotten through to him at all."

"What you _have_ said has gotten through just fine, it’s your angle that’s insufficient. You’re thinking of him only as your run-of-the-mill vet and POW again. This was the first time he’s broken character since he took up being Bucky Barnes Mk II, and ironically, the only truly, deeply ingrained instincts he has left are telling him he didn’t really have any say in it because whether or not to intervene wasn’t a matter of choice. _That_ ’s why he’s so unsettled."

" _Break character?_ What, like he’s been – putting on a act all this time? _Literally?_ "

"That’s oversimplifying things. But after the way Hydra worked him over, do you really think he just naturally snapped back to being this staggeringly well-adjusted guy in a matter of months? He’s not duping us, he’s not even duping _himself_. He _is_ doing incredibly well. But on some level, he’s still only _playing the part_ of the kind of free man he wants to be, taking his cues from the person he remembers being in his youth. And he’s determined to keep playing that part until it comes natural to him again and he doesn’t revert back to Hydra’s settings whenever the effort of being his own handler-programmer gets too exhausting or something jolts him out of the harmless civilian persona he’s adopted."

"...are you serious?"

"Oh, Sam. Isn’t it obvious?"

Only to her, apparently.)

– but it was so obvious Bucky was having a good time messing with the lot of them that letting him have his fun while it lasted had, apparently, won out.

Which meant Natasha was the only one still being regaled with redundant odes to Sam’s attractiveness, combat skills, and other great qualities, and ‘oops, did we agree to all go see the game together? Stark’s stopping by to have a look at my arm and I want Steve to hold my hand while he waves his scanner phone in my general direction to do so, so I’m afraid you two will have to attend on your own. those tickets cost an arm and a leg, wouldn’t want to waste them, right?’ made way for ‘hey, I heard about this club downtown that comes really highly recommended. Steve and I are old farts who only like stone-age music, but maybe Sam would like it’.

If Bucky didn’t resort to sex toys or some other blatantly ungentlemanly method by the end of the month, Natasha decided, she’d come clean about having been in a scandalous secret affair with Sam since the height of their Insight Day adrenaline high.

 

Natasha’s nose called her straight from her shower to the kitchen. It was not the disaster area clichés had taught her to expect, though Bucky had managed to both burn his attempt at a meal to black sludge _and_ make it explode across a quarter of the kitchen. He was slumped in a chair at the kitchen table, hands lying limply in his lap and staring dejectedly at the tabletop. His apron was stuffed halfway into the trashcan and there were black smudges on his face, like a poor man’s imitation of war paint.

"Impressive," Natasha said. "What were we having?"

He groaned and collapsed onto the tabletop, burying his head in his arms. "Kitchens don’t work the way they used to."

He’d mastered and reinvented every feature of this one within a week.

"That seems a bit dramatic for some burned water," Natasha said, taking the apron from the trash and throwing it across the hall into the doorway to the laundry room.

"I used to be better at this."

"At cooking?"

"At doing nice things for people." Bucky raised his head just enough to prop his chin on the table, stare through his hands at the opposite wall, and mumble, "I _know_ I used to be good at this, I can _feel_ it. I... I remember bringing a girl home once to borrow one of my sister’s good dresses. I’d set her up with Steve so we could all go out together, him and her and me and my sweetheart. I remember waiting outside Rebecca’s room while she changed and knocking on Steve’s door with that girl on my arm, and his mom telling us he’d come down with something, and I thought, ‘but he was fine when I saw him this morning, how much rotten luck can one guy have?’. Steve says I talked her into going out anyway just like I talked her into accepting my sister’s dress, and the girl met her future husband that night. She was poor as dirt but the guy was from a good family. They eloped and had five kids, and one of those kids became a doctor and invented the cure to some kind of nerve disease. Steve looked them up when he first woke up here. Apparently they were friends of ours right up until the war. I held their first baby."

Quite a butterfly effect for one failed attempt at matchmaking.

"And now..." Natasha finished.

"And now," Bucky confirmed morosely.

"You know –"

"If you say it’s the thought that counts I’m upending dinner on your head," he growled. "And don’t even start with the ‘nothing the Winter Soldier did was your fault Bucky’, that’s _not_ what I’m talking about."

What with the almost palpable cloud of miserable, frustrated failure hanging over him, she was inclined to believe him. He hadn’t so much as tipped a waiter for seventy years, it was bound to be tricky to get back into the habit of being... good. Of being more than what his fists and good aim could make him.

(God knows Natasha had had to learn the value of not phoning such things in from scratch.)

"The intent matters to the recipient. The result matters to you. I get it, sometimes the thought just doesn’t count for _enough_ , no matter how much of it you have to go around. But you can’t force something like this, Buck." She reached out a hand to ruffle his hair, then reconsidered and plastered herself across his bowed back instead. He turned his head toward her and she wrapped her arms around his stomach, patting his firm abs. "Just keep at it. One of these days Steve’s single-mindedness and Tony’s lack of professionalism and you being legally dead won’t be standing in the way, and you’ll find you never lost your touch. It’s just that in this century, you’re surrounded by idiots who insist on making life difficult for themselves and everyone around them."

"You realise Operation ‘Set Natasha Up With Sam’ is still ongoing, right?" Bucky pointed out with a small smile.

Natasha returned it. " _That_ joke, my friend, is on you. You just don’t know it yet."

 

"You two would have such beautiful babies," Bucky whispered as he and Sam watched Natasha fail once again to beat Steve’s Mario Cart high score, muttering angrily about cheating super soldier reflexes all the while.

Sam sighed. "Bucky, I asked you to stop going on about that."

"I know. I’m sorry. But you _would_ , and you’re both being stupid about it."

Grown men were not designed to pout; Bucky looked ridiculous doing it.

Not for the first time, Sam was tempted to set Bucky straight about the nature of his and Natasha’s relationship and redirect all that time and energy of his into helping Sam not ruin a good thing by wanting more than Natasha could give. But no. He couldn’t do that to her. Natasha wanted her privacy – Natasha _needed_ her privacy. She had made every horrible secret she’d ever kept public for the whole world to see, hadn’t had a choice in the matter – not anything a good person would _consider_ a choice, at any rate, and oh, she had so much more good in her than she ever seemed to give herself credit for – and had dealt with the deadly fall-out all alone for months. After all of that, she needed to feel like she had some control over her personal information again.

(She needed a periodic reassurance that she was in control of her _everything_ , period.)

If that meant keeping their relationship a secret from all their friends and never knowing if she’d be bunking over with him or the others until he was brushing his teeth, so be it. Here and now, Sam could give her that without harming himself in the process. And here and now, Sam could be content with the emotional distance she wished to keep.

"As my father used to say, ‘I’m sorry _but_ ’ isn’t a real apology," was all Sam told Bucky.

Bucky gave him an odd look for a moment, and then stood. "You’re right. I’m not actually sorry. I’m too frustrated with the two of you to be sorry. But I shouldn’t bother you about that after you’ve asked me not to, so I’ll go complain to Steve instead."

And he clapped Sam on the shoulder and went to help Steve with the snacks.

Natasha raised her eyebrow at Sam over her shoulder.

Sam shrugged.

"He’s got a point this time. Our offspring _would_ have good odds of great genes and devastating looks," she deadpanned.

 

Natasha emerged from the bathroom grumpy and aching and exhausted, but clean, and found Bucky in the kitchen pouring boiling water into an old-fashioned metal hot water bottle, spilling over his metal fingers without a care.

"Hey," he said, screwed the stopper onto the bottle, dried it off, and slipped it into a pale blue cover. He held it out to her, the spare end of the cloth sack first. "Here."

Natasha almost got a little misty-eyed from the force of her gratitude, it was that bad.

"How’d you know?" she asked, taking the bottle and pressing it to her abdomen without preamble. She sagged into him and groaned dramatically, her eyes slipping closed. Her kingdom for the ability to go back to bed and get another five hours of sleep – _proper_ sleep.

Bucky’s hand carded through her hair. "Blood in the laundry room."

"Ugh. Sorry, I thought I’d cleaned that up," she mumbled into his shoulder.

He shrugged. "Must’ve happened on your way out."

 _After_ she’d cleaned up the _first_ mess she’d made putting her soiled bedclothes into the washing machine. Because it was _that_ bad.

"I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted that you didn’t assume I’d been attacked."

He huffed a laugh and steered her gently into a chair at the kitchen table. "My youngest sister used to have the same problem. She slept on a piece of oilcloth for a week every month."

"And that is why I get a shot every half year," Natasha said in a flat, dead voice. The alternative was a tone of voice that reflected the carnage going on in her uterus. "I didn’t bother tracking my usual stuff down when I was overseas, I didn’t think the first time it came back would be this bad."

"Want me to make you something?"

"Oatmeal. The way Steve makes it, but with lots and lots of honey." She let her head loll back and watched Bucky take out a pot and ingredients upside-down. "You are an angel, Bucky Barnes."

He smiled faintly. It looked sad. "You’re the closest thing I have to a sister now, you know. No-one else around willing to get pampered."

 _Aww,_ Natasha thought. It _was_ sad.

"A Red Room sister to replace the star on your arm?"

As predictably as if she’d literally pushed a button, his hand went to his metal bicep – bare and brand-less ever since Tony’d gone at all the nasty Hydra hooks in his arm with the prejudice of a man who once woke up from an attempted assassination with a car battery lodged in his chest.

Ugh. Now _she_ was being sad.

Bucky made a face. "Sweetheart, I love you, but I’m not getting your face tattooed on my arm."

It startled her so much she laughed herself boneless.

"Here you go, Natty," he said a couple of minutes later, setting a steaming bowl of porridge down in front of her and his own by the seat across from her.

" _Natty?_ "

"You don’t like it?"

She gave him her best side-eye as she blew on a spoonful of oatmeal. "Is that an old-timey nickname?"

He raised his hands defensively. "Nadia, then?"

"Not if you’re going to pronounce it Natty-a, you awful, awful Yank."

"Ally?"

"That’s not how Russian patronymics work and you know it."

"But we’d match!" he said, grinning. "Bucky and Ally Barnesanoff. Ally and Bucky Romarnes."

"Natty is ridiculous," she said decisively, and focussed on her food.

Five spoonfuls later:

"You’re the only one who gets to use it. And only because ‘Bucky’ is equally ridiculous."

"Going down in history as ‘Bucky Barnes’ instead of ‘James’ is my proudest achievement." She didn’t even have to look up to feel him beam. "Taste good?"

"Like heaven, as always."

"Good. I’m still not sure how I turned our food into an explosive the other day, so it’s better to be safe than sorry."

They ate in what Natasha thought was a companionable silence for a while, but apparently the sister comment had been more than just a passing thought.

"All of this... trying to get you your man, I mean... it’s not just because I shot you, back before. You know that, right?" His expression was painfully earnest. "I want to give something back to you for everything you’re giving me."

Natasha’s brow furrowed in confusion.

"Except for Steve, literally everyone I ever – everyone is gone," he said tersely, staring hard at the tabletop. "And my nieces and nephews... that’s a bad idea right now. Steve’s a life-saver in more ways than I can count, but he needs a life outside of worrying over me too." He looked up. "I don’t know what either of us would do if you weren’t around so much. You and Sam both, though, you know, he doesn’t come around to be a freeloader quite as much. Just... you being here – being my... my ‘Red Room sister’ –"

 _Oh Barnes, you smooth-talker,_ Natasha thought with terrible affection.

"– it makes everything not seem so desolate. And I want to repay you. Make you comfortable too."

She let that sink in for a moment. Then she allowed herself the weakness of ducking her head to avoid his eyes. The blatant body language would help get the sentiment across to him more easily, sure, but she wanted to not have to hide feeling so vulnerable too, and – oh, fuck it.

"You don’t have to repay me anything," she said, laying her hand over his on the table. "You’re giving back plenty just letting me be those things to you. Being your Red Room big sister makes everything not feel so desolate for me too."

He turned his hand palm up and squeezed hers. Then he leaned in close. "Who says you’re the _big_ sister?"

Her head snapped up, her mouth open wide in only slightly exaggerated outrage. "Need I remind you, I’ve been at this freedom game a lot longer now than you have."

"I have twenty-seven years of freedom _before_ Hydra and the Red Room to draw from. And don’t give me that look. I was born first, I’m taller than you are, and anyway, I’m _always_ the big brother regardless." Bucky smiled. "And I take good care of my little brothers and sisters."

Natasha’s expression softened without her prompting, and she let it. "You do, don’t you?"

 

"Let’s get married," Natasha said out of the blue one day.

Sam knew what a bad idea it was to encourage her, but there was orange juice coming out his nose before he could help it. _"What?"_ he spluttered. "Motherfu– _ow_. Goddammit."

Her mischievous smirk was unwavering, but she patiently waited to speak until he’d hacked up the citrusy fire lodged in his nasal cavities into the sink and concluded that snorting tap water to rinse out the lingering smell did as much harm as good.

"We elope to Vegas, honeymoon for a week, and get divorced. Then we go home and carry on as we have been," she explained.

Sam wiped the tears from his eyes and looked at her as sharply as the fruity trauma would allow. "Are you okay?" he rasped.

Natasha shrugged, smiling more warmly. "I’ve never done anything like it before. It’ll be fun."

"Does the sanctity of marriage not mean anything to you?"

"Nope."

"That’s not what all those civil rights movements were for, you know."

He dropped back into his chair, coughing. Making vaguely apologetic cooing noises, Natasha rubbed his scalp and swiped a stray bit of moisture from the corner of his eye with her thumb.

"I disagree. It’s not _real_ freedom until you feel free to make terrible jokes out of it just because you can. We helped make the world a little bit freer. We should celebrate."

"Save the world, get hitched, meet Elvis?"

She waggled her eyebrows. _Good lord,_ he thought, seeing the exited glint in her eyes. _This woman is wonderful. And absolutely cray-cray._

"I have officially lost control of my life," Sam announced aloud. "And possibly my sanity."

There had to be a line, though, and if he didn’t draw it now, he never would.

"Alright, let’s do it. On one condition – you meet my mama first."

Natasha’s expression shuttered immediately.

Sam shrugged and grinned, making as light of it as possible. "Fair trade. I step out of my comfort zone, you step out of yours. Besides, mom’s always loved knitting sweaters for my girlfriends."

"Did you introduce Steve to your mother before you got back into the game for him too?"

"Nah, girl. There’s a difference between things you either die for or learn to live with, and things you _want_ in your life."

There was a long moment of silent, blank-faced staring. Then her eyes grew heavy-lidded and her smile returned, soft and – dare he imagine it? – shy. "Okay." And then, _there_ was the twinkle and the cheek again. " _Husband_."

"Wife," Sam returned, warm, buoyant happiness rapidly filling his chest. "Wanna live in sin a little more while we still can?"

Natasha nipped at his lower lip and snuck her hands under his shirt for an answer.

 

Three weeks later, she stopped at the top of the stairs to his mother’s apartment building to pat her hair into shape. "What’d you tell her about me?"

"First name and coloring. Your sweater’s gonna look great on you, promise."

She gave him a quick, speculative look, and sure enough, when he said, "Just be yourself. For me?" it morphed into a longsuffering _was that really necessary?_ one.

"Your funeral."

"Mom will love you, Nat. She’s the one who raised me to, after all."

That got a smile out of her, and there was a little extra bounce in her step as they crossed the hallway to his mother’s front door.

Her married couple nickname was going to be ‘Cat’, Sam decided. ‘Catty Nat’. ‘Catsy Nat’. ‘Kit-Cat Nat’. It was gonna be a _glorious_ week.

 

Halfway through Father Elvis’s speech, the doors to the garish little Vegas chaple burst open and a stocky blond guy in a bomber jacket and reflective purple shades came running up the aisle, yelling "I OBJECT!"

"I hadn’t gotten to that part yet, pal," Elvis said jovially. This probably happened all the time around here.

"NOT WITHOUT YOUR BEST MAN, NAT!"

"There you are!" Natasha tugged her hands from Sam’s and threw herself at the newcomer, who caught and spun her, the neon-colored tulle layers of her costume flashing as she laughed. "I thought you’d never show."

"Hi," Sam said as the new arrival set Natasha down and whispered in her ear. "Sam Wilson, nice to meet you. Is Natasha leaving me at the altar and running off with the bridesmale? Is that what this is? I shouldn’t have gone for the sequined pants, huh? I knew it."

The new guy looked up and laughed. "What? Your pants are awesome, man."

Natasha stole the guy’s sunglasses and raised an eyebrow at Sam over the top of them.

"Hey, that’s totally something you would do, don’t even deny it. It would be the perfect plot twist to this crazy plan and I wouldn’t even mind that it was at my expense, but even my awesome improvisation skills have their limits."

"Now that you mention it, I’m ashamed the idea hadn’t occurred to me. But no. Sam, this is Clint, my old partner. Clint, this is Sam, my two-minutes-away-from-husband. Sam helped me and Cap put you out of a job."

"We duel at dawn," the guy declared.

"Damn, man, can it wait a day? You’d be cutting my wedding night awful short there."

"I like him. You picked good, Nat." Clint held out his hand, which Sam shook. "Clint Barton, nice to meet you."

"Sam Wilson, likewise."

"You don’t know half of it, pal. You were a pararescue Falcon, right?"

Sam blinked. "Uh, yeah. _The_ Falcon these days, I guess, but – yeah."

Clint grinned. "My code name was Hawkeye."

"You boys did not know this," Natasha said, putting one hand on each of their shoulders and leaning in close. "But you are now officially best friends. As long as you associate with me, you will be inseparable. You’ll make bird puns. You’ll raise foulmouthed cockatoo babies. You’ll wear matching shirts – I’ll get them made for you."

"Oh god," Sam said, barely keeping a straight face. "This is the woman I’m marrying. Why. What have I done. Et cetera et cetera."

"She has pretty great taste in shirts," Clint conceded.

Elvis scraped his throat.

"But first, _you_ , walk me to the altar, and _you_ , marry me."

"Sorry man," Sam told Elvis, turning back toward the altar and holding out his arm to Natasha, who had backed up a couple of steps so Clint could actually lead her forward.

"Happens all the time," Elvis confirmed.

 

Despite Natasha’s ominous claims about genetically fusing him and Sam at the hip, Clint and Sam got to know each other a little and he caught up with Natasha in what Sam was coming to recognize as spy-typical cryptic terms before politely buggering off the next evening. That left Sam and Natasha to do what honeymoons were supposed to be for, which in their case was screw each other senseless and not give a damn anymore who noticed.

Sam insisted that they not traumatize the room service lady, though.

The government clerk who handled their divorce papers at the end of the week gave them a mightily unimpressed look. "Land of the free!" Natasha said in a heavy, affected Russian accent, and Sam gave up his straight-manning attempt and buried his face in her hair, wheezing with laughter.

 

They were forewarned by the presence of Steve’s bike in Sam’s driveway, so there were no shots fired or bones broken when they stepped into the living room and were greeted with a loud, bright and energetic ‘SURPRISE!’. It had also given them the opportunity to agree to play the cool cat and look bored until it either killed them or made their guests make funny faces.

The faces were priceless.

"You couldn’t even _pretend_ to be surprised?" Steve complained.

Natasha tilted her head, increasing her unimpressed-ness another three hundred percent.

"Whatever," Bucky said, and elbowed Steve with a look of determination. "Speech."

"Right."

Steve’s grin was disconcerting.

The decorations were cheerful and extravagant but conspicuously non-specific. There were big pieces of cloth thrown across the dining table, though, covering piles of unidentifiable objects.

Sam and Natasha barely had time to exchange alarmed glances before Steve grabbed them both by a shoulder and manoeuvred them toward it.

"We were worried where you’d disappeared off to at first, but then Clint dropped by and mentioned that you’d eloped," Steve said. "The three of us celebrated Bucky’s success, but of course _you’re_ the ones who should _really_ be celebrated. So without further ado –"

Bucky pulled one of the cloths up and away and revealed –

...a cake in the shape of a life-size baby.

Steve beamed at them. "You youngsters may think you invented sex, but Bucky and I know perfectly well what such a sudden and unexpected union means. Congratulations, mom and dad to-be!"

Dead silence followed. Sam and Natasha caught each other’s eyes.

"Am I hallucinating?" Sam asked under his breath.

Natasha shook her head and covered her mouth, visibly fighting for composure.

"I get to be godfather, right?" Bucky asked, grinning from ear to ear. "I put so much effort into getting you two together, I feel like I was there when this baby was made."

Natasha caved and folded in on herself with the force of her laughter.

"Guys..." Sam started, just the tiniest bit unsure whether to give in and laugh his ass off too or play it safe on the teeny tiny off chance they _weren’t_ trying to mess with them. "There is no – we didn’t –"

"We’ve been together since Insight Day," Natasha finished for him, wiping her eyes and hiccupping a little as she fought to get her breathing back under control. "There, I said it. We’re an established couple. We’re starting to see our first anniversary looming on the horizon. We’re in love and have been for a while, even if we didn’t start out like it when we first started having sex."

"HA!" Bucky crowed. "I knew it! Pay up, Steve!"

Sam and Natasha’s jaws dropped.

Steve whipped out a camera he’d been hiding on his person and snapped a picture of their faces at the speed of light. Money exchanged hands, and Bucky and Steve high-fived.

"We’ve been had," Natasha said wonderingly. " _I’ve_ been had."

Sam shot her a worried glance, but she looked at Steve and Bucky with rare, unrestrained delight. "You two finally learned to tell a lie."

And that’s what they ended up celebrating that day: two supersoldier padawans graduating to Sith Lords.

Well, that and Bucky and Steve’s new puppy, who had been chewing on a meat ribbon under the table all this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments on older fics will ALWAYS remain welcome.


End file.
